Nancy Lyttle, one member of the Palo Alto City Council, asked everybody that had been in the room when Palo Alto discussed a peace initiative to raise their hands, and a lot of people did. Then she thanked them for the disciplined show of citizenship that left no doubt in her mind that voting for the proposal was the right thing to do.

Jim Burch, another member of the Palo Alto City Council, talked about how his father had been a soldier in WWI, and he had been a soldier in WWII. He said that he had considered it his patriotic duty to vote for the resolution that Palo Alto had passed saying the city was opposed to Bush's Preemptive War. He indicated that his fellow city council member, the woman in the middle above had been even braver than he was voting for it, because she is up for election this year. Every vote in the crowd, and every other one we could dig up is going to be needed for the struggle.

Later Reverend Gibson, a leader of the spiritual community working for peace explained that following the conclusion of the rally there would be a 24 hour vigil on this plaza for anyone that wanted to be there. She invited everybody to join them.

I first saw this woman on the stage Monday, at the peace rally she organized at De Anza College, where she gave a speech saying that as a white woman she was painfully aware that she would have to change many things about her life to address the underlying problems of the way we live. She led us on a lightning fast march then, and she was still charging ahead here.

George from the Veterans for Peace had advice for people thinking of joining up to fight the Oil Company War about to break out in Iraq, "Don't do it." He felt that President George Bush II, who managed to miss fourteen months of his National Guard Service, would just use you up and toss you aside. He talked about how the Veterans Hospital has a new policy of not accepting any more patients, which was pinching people he knows who need help. After he got back to the Veterans for Peace table, I gave him an Illinois quarter. He looked at the coin briefly and then put it in the donation can, along with all the other money people where empowering his organization with.

David Harris said some really global things about how important it is that everybody in the crowd do everything possible to turn around the situation. The Palo Alto Daily News gave several paragraphs in its coverage to his speech. The zingiest quote was "How can we be expected to bring democracy to Iraq when we can't even bring it to Florida?" He also said that "Any pre-emptive war would be an insult to the memory of those who died on September 11th."

This woman explained that the depleted uranium bullets that had been scattered around the battlefields during the Gulf War were still giving people problems like severe birth defects, and not just among Iraq's children. She showed us a picture of an American GI who had been there during those hostilities. He was standing with his son that did not have anything close to a normal human look. The pictures she was showing us seemed to me at least as bad as the ones the Christians brandish outside abortion clinics.

One of the best things about the Raging Grannies is their hats. What a sight!